Spectacular collision of suns will create new star in night sky in 2022

At the beginning of the 3rd century civil war raged in Britain as the Roman emperor Septimius Severus sought to quell unrest in the north.

But unknown to the fighting cohorts and Caledonian tribes, high above their heads two stars were coming together in a huge cataclysmic explosion.

Now 1800 years later the light from that collision will finally arrive on Earth creating a new star in the night sky – dubbed the ‘Boom Star – in an incredibly rare event which is usually only spotted through telescopes.

Before their meeting the two stars were too dim to be seen by the naked eye, but in 2022, the newly formed Red Nova will burn so brightly in the constellation Cygnus that everyone will be able to to see it.

“For the first time in history, parents will be able to point to a dark spot in the sky and say, ‘Watch, kids, there’s a star hiding in there, but soon it’s going to light up,” said Dr Matt Walhout, dean for research and scholarship at Calvin College, Michigan, where the prediction was made.

The Lost Canals of Venice of America

Secreted away from the hustle and bustle of the famous boardwalk, the picturesque canals of Venice, California, are one of the seaside community’s hidden charms. But in Venice’s early years, the canals that survive today were only a sideshow. The main attraction – the original canals of Abbot Kinney’s Venice of America – are lost to history, long ago filled in and now disguised as residential streets.

In planning Venice of America, Kinney incorporated several references to the community’s Mediterranean namesake, from the Italianate architecture to his fanciful notion of launching a cultural renaissance there. But Venice of America would not have lived up to its name were it not for its canals.

When it opened on July 4, 1905, Venice of America boasted seven distinct canals arranged in an irregular grid pattern, as seen below in Kinney’s master plan for the community. Totaling nearly two miles and dredged out of former saltwater marshlands, the canals encircled four islands, including the tiny triangular United States Island. The widest of them, appropriately named Grand Canal, terminated at a large saltwater lagoon. Three of the smaller canals referred to celestial bodies: Aldebaran, Venus, and Altair.

Large and potentially dangerous asteroids and comets are extremely rare, scientists said – ‘But on the other hand they are the extinction-level events.’ Photograph: Mopic / Alamy/Alamy

Humans are woefully unprepared for a surprise asteroid or comet, a Nasa scientist warned on Monday, at a presentation with nuclear scientists into how humans might deflect cosmic dangers hurtling toward Earth.

“The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment,” said Dr Joseph Nuth, a researcher with Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Speaking at the annual meeting of American Geophysical Union, Nuth noted that large and potentially dangerous asteroids and comets are extremely rare, compared to the small objects that occasionally explode in Earth’s sky or strike its surface. “But on the other hand they are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially. You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point.”

Comets follow distant paths from Earth but sometimes get knocked into the neighborhood. Nuth said that the Earth had “a close encounter” in 1996, when an aberrant comet flew into Jupiter, and then again in 2014, when a comet passed “within cosmic spitting distance of Mars”. That second comet was only discovered 22 months before its brush with a planet: not nearly enough time to launch a deflection mission, had it been on a course for Earth.

Kuso is the grossest movie ever made

There are a number of reasons I’m hesitant to recommend Kuso, the first film from artist and musician Steven Ellison, aka Flying Lotus. (Spoilers and grotesquely explicit descriptions ahead.) I’ll start with the footage of an erect penis being stabbed. As with most footage of an erect penis being violently gored by a long steel rod, it’s certainly unexpected. So by the time you cover your eyes, it’s already too late. And if you happened to blink, it’s cool, Kusodelivers a callback.

To paraphrase the official plot synopsis, Kuso is a collection of semi-connected short films chronicling the lives of the mutated women, men, and children of Los Angeles, following the earthquake to end all earthquakes. But that’s not really Kuso’s story, let alone its point. While the film does hint at some interesting (though opaque) commentary about Los Angeles, racism, and the grim and bloody history of America, its creators are mostly interested in one thing: producing the grossest film ever.

They succeed. The sliced eyeball in Un Chien Andalou, the copious shit in River of Fundament, the corporeal mutilation of the entire torture-porn genre: it’s all an amuse-bouchefor the final course that is Kuso.

NASA ‘cuts live feed from international space station’ after mysterious object appears on camera

A self-styled alien hunter believes he has spotted a UFO during a live feed from the International Space Station.

John Craddick, from Wolverhampton in the UK, claims he has never seen anything like it before.

He told the Mirror: “I’ve been watching it [the live feed] for years but never seen any UFOs on it before.

“I was showing a friend how it worked at around 11.30pm when the feed cut out, and 35 seconds after it came back on, this object appeared.
“At first it was really small and then it grew bigger, lasting for about 25 seconds,” he said.

Mr Craddick claims that it must be alien because “nothing human can fly that high”

Say goodbye to LACMA’s beloved yellow spaghetti installation

While droves of visitors are busy posing in between the lamp posts of “Urban Light” or pretending to hold up the 340-ton “Levitated Mass” for a fun photo, LACMA regulars know that the Miracle Mile museum’s most fun photogenic installation is a hands-on piece from 1990 that resides next to the entrance of the Ahmanson Building. But it turns out those swinging spaghetti strands won’t be around for much longer.

Jesús Rafael Soto’s “Penetrable,” a thick curtain of yellow plastic hoses, will wrap up its stay at LACMA on February 12. The kinetic installation has invited visitors to get lost in its tangle of human-scale strands since 2011. We had grown so accustomed to the late Venezuelan artist’s sculpture that we assumed LACMA owned the piece, but it was instead part of a long-term loan from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, to which it’ll return next month.

SPEED QUEENS: THE FEARLESS FEMALE DRAG RACERS OF THE 60S AND 70S

By Cherrybomb

Shirley “Cha Cha” Muldowney on the cover of ‘Sunday News Magazine’ in 1978.

Like many fields of work, the drag racing scene was and is fairly well dominated by men. During its heyday, specifically the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, the National Hot Rod Association incorporated the use of gorgeous women/models to help appeal to the fanboys. If you were into that scene, you probably spent a lot of time fantasizing about Pam Hardy aka “Jungle Pam” who accompanied driver “Jungle Jim” Liberman across the country clad in go-go boots and form-fitting, barely-there outfits that showcased her bodacious “assets” while she showboated on the track and in the pit for her adoring fans. Though Liberman would pass away unexpectedly in 1977, Hardy would continue to appear at racing events. But this post isn’t about buxom blonde race track cheerleaders. It’s about the ballsy women who drove the cars during that era—and there were actually quite a lot of “speed queens” that not only gave their male counterparts a run for their money, but also blazed a trail for other women who wanted smoke up the track.

And since I know you’re curious, here’s a shot of “Jungle Pam.” Though her attire says otherwise, it must have been cold that day.

Maserati Driver Killed In Crash Remembered As ‘Wonderful Young Man’

HIGHLANDS RANCH, Colo. (CBS4) – Investigators have identified the driver of a Maserati killed in a crash in Douglas County.

Brandon Gionapoulos, 24, died when the blue Maserati he was driving landed in a ditch near C-470 and Lucent Boulevard. The mangled car was spotted by a passerby around 10 a.m. Saturday, but it’s not yet clear when the crash occurred.

Gionapoulos was a sales employee for the Mike Ward Maserati and Infiniti dealership and part of his job gave him access to the high-performance vehicles, authorities told CBS4. The dealership is located just about a mile from where the crash happened.

Hours before, around 7:25 p.m. Friday, Gionapoulos posted a Facebook Live video showing the dashboard of a Maserati. The short video shows the vehicle going from zero to 111 miles per hour in just about 20 seconds, and then ends.

The paradox powering Earth’s magnetic field

Our planet’s protective force field appears to be billions of years older than the mechanism that got it going. So what really made Earth magnetic?

By Marcus Woo

Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center

IT IS Earth’s silent defender. Without it, a constant onslaught of charged particles would bombard our planet’s atmosphere, changing its chemistry and disrupting our electronic infrastructure. Assuming any of that stuff was even there to disrupt. In Earth’s infancy, our guardian may have prevented the sun’s action from stripping away the protective bubble of gas surrounding our planet entirely, and so allowed life – and eventually intelligent life – to flourish.

This silent defender is Earth’s magnetic field, a force field whose source lies in the churning molten iron that forms the planet’s core. Electrons flowing through this fluid generate an electric current, which in turn creates a magnetic field. The core is a giant, self-sustaining electromagnet: a dynamo.

How David Bowie Perfected the Concept Album on ‘Low’

It’s been said the beginning of Kosmische Musik—the hypnotic, minimalist style of music crudely dubbed “Krautrock” by the British press in the late ’60s—lies in the wake of World War II. The trance-like atmosphere and sterilized rhythms were the result of a sound designed to mirror the shell shock that fell over Germany after the demise of the Third Reich as well as the Schlager pop music deemed appropriate for public consumption by the government.

“There were not too many ways for a German rock musician to perform music, to make music, even to think of the theoretical development of music because there was no heritage in the country,” explains the late Edgar Froese of the groundbreaking electronic outfit Tangerine Dream in the BBC documentary Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany.

“And the Germans were in a very bad situation. You couldn’t forget that. I mean, they were so stupid and guilty for it, to start two wars. As horrific as it was it had one, forgive me to say that, one positive point. There was nothing else to lose. They lost everything. And so, when we thought about doing music in a different form, there was only the free form, the abstract form.”

Oddly enough, when David Bowie began exploring this new music coming out of Germany from groups like Tangerine Dream and Cluster and Kraftwerk, he was coming under fire for some of the things he was saying while under his Thin White Duke persona in 1976.

The Man Who’s Trying to Kill Dark Matter

FOR 80 YEARS, scientists have puzzled over the way galaxies and other cosmic structures appear to gravitate toward something they cannot see. This hypothetical “dark matter” seems to outweigh all visible matter by a startling ratio of five to one, suggesting that we barely know our own universe. Thousands of physicists are doggedly searching for these invisible particles.

But the dark matter hypothesis assumes scientists know how matter in the sky ought to move in the first place. At the end of 2016, a series of developments has revived a long-disfavored argument that dark matter doesn’t exist after all. In this view, no missing matter is needed to explain the errant motions of the heavenly bodies; rather, on cosmic scales, gravity itself works in a different way than either Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein predicted.

The latest attempt to explain away dark matter is a much-discussed proposal by Erik Verlinde, a theoretical physicist at the University of Amsterdam who is known for bold and prescient, if sometimes imperfect, ideas. In a dense 51-page paper posted online on Nov. 7, Verlinde casts gravity as a byproduct of quantum interactions and suggests that the extra gravity attributed to dark matter is an effect of “dark energy”—the background energy woven into the space-time fabric of the universe.

Instead of hordes of invisible particles, “dark matter is an interplay between ordinary matter and dark energy,” Verlinde said.

Helen Mirren Is on Her Way to Kardashian-Level Instagram Mastery

Oh, what a difference three years makes for Helen Mirren, queen of moviegoer hearts and, now, Instagram feeds. In 2014, the Oscar-winning actress took an aggressively anti-social media stance, telling press, “I’m not a social-media person. . . . I find it distasteful.” Speaking of a 24-hour experiment with Facebook, Mirren said, “I just found it so intrusive and I didn’t want strangers wanting to become my friends. I just didn’t want that. There was something really scary about it and I didn’t like it at all.” So imagine our surprise in discovering on Thursday that Mirren has not only embraced her new Instagram account, but begun posting the kind of photos typically seen in the feeds of Kardashian family members—bathtub pics!

On Thursday, while in Paris for a L’Oréal photo shoot, the actress took to the social platform to share a very behind-the-scenes shot of her Parisian hotel accommodations. Mirren posted a photo of her feet, while soaking in a bathtub, and captioned it: “ahh end of the day in the bath. You cannot overestimate how fortunate I feel”

Giant telescope in Chile to seek habitable planets in Alpha Centauri

This artist’s impression shows the planet orbiting the star Alpha Centauri B, a member of the triple star system that is the closest to Earth in this image released on October 17, 2012. REUTERS/ESO/L. Calcada/N. Risinger

SANTIAGO (Reuters) – The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile will be modified in order to allow it to search more effectively for potentially habitable planets in Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to Earth.

The ESO said it has signed a deal with Breakthrough Starshot, a venture that aims to deploy thousands of tiny spacecraft to travel to the system and send back pictures.

Starshot, which is backed by internet billionaire Yuri Milner and physicist Stephen Hawking, will provide funding to allow equipment on the Very Large Telescope that studies in the mid-infrared to be adapted to better detect faint planets, the ESO said in a statement on Monday.

The adaption will have the effect of reducing bright stellar light that drowns out relatively dim planets, improving the chances of finding them, it said.

How Video Games Satisfy Basic Human Needs

BY SIMON PARKIN

“Mass Effect: Andromeda” | Image from IGN / Bioware / YouTube

Grand Theft Auto, that most lavish and notorious of all modern videogames, offers countless ways for players to behave. Much of this conduct, if acted out in our reality, would be considered somewhere between impolite and morally reprehensible. Want to pull a driver from her car, take the wheel, and motor along a sidewalk? Go for it. Eager to steal a bicycle from a 10-year-old boy? Get pedaling. Want to stave off boredom by standing on a clifftop to take pot shots at the screaming gulls? You’re doing the local tourism board a favor. For a tabloid journalist in search of a hysteric headline, the game offers a trove of misdemeanors certain to outrage any non-player.

Except, of course, aside from its pre-set storyline, Grand Theft Auto doesn’t prescribe any of these things. It merely offers us a playpen, one that, like our own cities, is filled with opportunities, and arbitrated by rules and consequences. And unless you’re deliberately playing against type, or are simply clumsy, you can’t help but bring yourself into interactive fiction. In Grand Theft Auto, your interests and predilections will eventually be reflected in your activity, be it hunting wild animals, racing jet-skis, hiring prostitutes, buying property, planning heists, or taking a bracing hike first thing in the morning. If you are feeling hateful in the real world, the game provides a space in which to act hatefully. As the philosophers say: wherever you go, there you will be.

TV News Roundup

by Dani Levy

CASTING

Three new cast members will join Syfy‘s “The Haunted” as series regulars. Steve Kazee and David Alpay will play two of the four siblings in the Bradley family reunited after their parent’s death, slowly fixing their relationships with each other and navigating between the all too real ghosts from their pasts. DeVaughn Nixon will play a detective, investigating the mysterious circumstances around the deaths. Full Fathom Five’s James Frey and Todd Cohen will executive produce. Pilot writer Noga Landau, of “Tau” and “The Magicians,” will also co-executive produce.

Why some artists no longer want to be famous

An art piece protected by a plexiglass pane by British artist Banksy, seen on a beach in Calais, northern France (AFP Photo/Philippe Huguen)

Paris (AFP) – “I love being famous,” the black US comedian Chris Rock once quipped. “It’s almost like being white.”

But a growing number of artists would rather have success without the encumbrance of fame.

From the street artist Banksy to the Italian literary phenomenon Elena Ferrante, a new brand of creator is actively rejecting the limelight and doing everything they can to avoid it.

Even first-time novelists, whose publishers are often desperate for them to go out and promote their work, are thumbing their noses at celebrity.

One young French novelist, who writes under the pseudonym of Joseph Andras, rejected the country’s top prize for a first book last year because it threatened his anonymity.

Like Ferrante, whose Naples quartet has become a huge international bestseller, Andras refuses to be photographed and only does interviews via email.

“A baker makes bread, a plumber unblocks pipes and writers write,” he declared in his only interview, granted to the Communist newspaper L’Humanite. “Everything is in the book, I don’t really see what more I have to add.”

SCIENTISTS believe a massive object which could change our understanding of history is hidden beneath the Antarctic ice.

The huge and mysterious “anomaly” is thought to be lurking beneath the frozen wastes of an area called Wilkes Land.

It stretches for a distance of 151 miles across and has a maximum depth of about 848 metres.

Some researchers believe it is the remains of a truly massive asteroid which was more than twice the size of the Chicxulub space rock which wiped out the dinosaurs.

If this explanation is true, it could mean this killer asteroid caused the Permian–Triassic extinction event which killed 96 percent of Earth’s sea creatures and up to 70 percent of the vertebrate organisms living on land.

However, the wilder minds of the internet have come up with their own theories, with some conspiracy theorists claiming it could be a massive UFO base or a portal to a mysterious underworld called the Hollow Earth.

This “Wilkes Land gravity anomaly” was first uncovered in 2006, when NASA satellites spotted gravitational changes which indicated the presence of a huge object sitting in the middle of a 300 mile wide impact crater.

Why swimming in the sea is good for you

by Sergio Diez Alvarez

Ocean swimming and the associated salty environment have been shown to ease the symptoms of hay fever.

If you live near the sea, make frequent trips to the beach, or are planning an island holiday this summer, chances are you’re getting more out of it than just enjoyment. It has long been thought sea frolicking has many health benefits.

Historically, doctors would recommend their patients go to the seaside to improve various ills. They would actually issue prescriptions detailing exactly how long, how often and under what conditions their patients were to be in the water.

In 1769, a popular British doctor Richard Russell published a dissertation arguing for using seawater in “diseases of the glands”, in which he included scurvy, jaundice, leprosy and glandular consumption, which was the name for glandular fever at the time.

The caves that prove Neanderthals were cannibals

Deep in the caves of Goyet in Belgium researchers have found the grisly evidence that the Neanderthals did not just feast on horses or reindeer, but also on each other.

Human bones from a newborn, a child and four adults or teenagers who lived around 40,000 years ago show clear signs of cutting and of fractures to extract the marrow within, they say.

“It is irrefutable, cannibalism was practised here,” says Belgian archaeologist Christian Casseyas as he looks inside a cave halfway up a valley in this site in the Ardennes forest.

The bones in Goyet date from when Neanderthals were nearing the end of their time on earth before being replaced by Homo sapiens, with whom they also interbred.

Once regarded as primitive cavemen driven to extinction by smarter modern humans, studies have found that Neanderthals were actually sophisticated beings who took care of the bodies of the deceased and held burial rituals.